Word.ws English Dictionary

secret handshake

secret handshake noun: a distinct form of handshake, often with the fingers or thumbs specially positioned, that covertly indicates a person's membership of a club or clique.

Noun

secret handshake (plural secret handshakes)

  1. A distinct form of handshake, often with the fingers or thumbs specially positioned, that covertly indicates a person's membership of a club or clique.
  2. (broadly, figuratively) Any shibboleth or distinguishing sign.
    • Stuart Auerbach, who covered legal affairs at the Washington Post, has speculated that lawyers' language serves “as a secret handshake in a fraternity, letting others know you are one of the tribe.”2003, Tom Goldstein, Jethro K. Lieberman, The Lawyer's Guide to Writing Well, page 19
    • A signal that is not used by the population at large can be used by mutant members as a kind of secret handshake to identify an in-group. Mutants can then cooperate with those who share the secret handshake and defect against the others.2012, Jan van Eijck, Rineke Verbrugge, Games, Actions, and Social Software: Multidisciplinary Aspects, page 176

Forms of secret handshake

pluralsecret handshakes

Questions about secret handshake

What does secret handshake mean?
Secret handshake means a distinct form of handshake, often with the fingers or thumbs specially positioned, that covertly indicates a person's membership of a club or clique.
What part of speech is secret handshake?
Secret handshake is a noun.
What is the plural of secret handshake?
The plural of secret handshake is secret handshakes.

Words near secret handshake in the dictionary

  1. secret ballots
  2. secret chancellor
  3. secret chancellors
  4. secret government
  5. secret governments
  6. secret handshake
  7. secret handshakes
  8. secret histories
  9. secret history
  10. secret ink
  11. secret inks

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: secret handshake (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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